Dave says that simply making the Web audible is "a fantastically
terrible idea" and I actually agree, at least if you are talking
about media translation, rather than new media creation.
And navigation rather than consumption.
What I'm thinking about is more along the lines of taking those
"fantastically terrible" voice-prompted menus that you have
to touchtone your way through right now in calling automated
phone services, and putting them where they should be:
on a screen, where you can navigate through them much
more rapidly.
What would be bulk text content on a web page, however,
would be read to the user, but perhaps with heading displays
on the screen so that audio sections could be skipped and
browsed by pushbutton. I think this combines the strengths
of both hypertext and audio, while minimizing the weaknesses
of both when delivered over a handset.
I actually don't envision current web pages (most of them,
anyway) being converted to this form, automatically or
otherwise. I think you'll probably see whole new classes
of providers, possibly coming out of old-media niches
like newspaper chains, magazine publishers, and radio-
station operators, but more likely completely new.
Someone once said that every new medium gets initially
populated by converting the most obvious old media.
This isn't always the right thing.
In the case of wireless internet, the most obvious
source medium is also something relatively new:
Web content. It may pay to look further back, though.
In short, it's not audio-only vs. text-only, but rather
how to combine the two in a nice way.
Michael Turner
www.idiom.com/~turner
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave" <dmg@autotelic.com>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 4:38 PM
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: [Internet Insight]2000.07.14: Wireless Web, Listen
Up
>
> > I *do* agree with Harmon when he says "The larger problem
> > with wireless Web comes in the lack of audio-ized files.
> > Voice-delivery (in lieu of text that would be too long for
> > small screens) has a future. This view requires looking at
> > potential content through a different set of lenses than most
> > webbies have grown up with, though. How many of them
> > know their way around a recording booth? The good stuff
> > will probably come out of the digital-telephony area, not
> > the standard webmaster milieu.
>
> I might be alone and crazy on this, but I think audio as a method of
> delivering web content is a fantastically terrible idea.
> If I have the concept right, some people are proposing that a web page
could
> be essentially audio in format, thus side stepping the problem of tiny
> mobile screens with their lousy display. For some stuff it's logical, like
> if you are going to order music on-line you obviously want to hear it
first.
> I can imagine on line books and whatnot. But not to any extent greater
than
> audio is being used on the "regular" web (by "regular" I mean non-mobile.)
> Who would want to hear URL links told to them over a speaker? "Press one
if
> you want to go here, press two if you want to go there..." Don't people
> already get that on phones, and doesn't it annoy the heck outta you?
> I can hear the rumblings at the back of the room from the people who think
> I'm not being "visionary" enough by discounting audio as a content
delivery
> method so soon. But I think there are quantifiable differences between the
> audio and visual mediums which make trying to do the work of one with the
> other rather silly. You can scan a screen of stock quotes - even if you
have
> to use the scroll bar - much quicker than you can have them read to you,
> even if you have the ability to keep pressing "next" when you discover you
> aren't hearing what you want to know.
> I'll stick to my guns on the theory that if a phone can be given a screen
> about the size of a Palm Pilot V, in colour, with the resolution of a
> standard photograph of about the same size, then most of the problems
> associated with small screen interfaces will be resolved. The remainder of
> the problem of getting the data onto a screen that size is the same
problem
> that will always exist and exists on interfaces of any size - design,
layout
> and artistry.
> My .02$
>
> Dave
>
>
>
Received on Tue Jul 18 15:23:14 2000